Perceptually salient spectrotemporal modulations for recognition of sustained musical instruments.

Modulation Power Spectra include dimensions of spectral and temporal modulation that contribute significantly to the perception of musical instrument timbres. Nevertheless, it remains unknown whether each instrument's identity is characterized by specific regions in this representation. A recognition task was applied to tuba, trombone, cello, saxophone, and clarinet sounds resynthesized with filtered spectrotemporal modulations. The most relevant parts of this representation for instrument identification were determined for each instrument. In addition, instruments that were confused with each other led to non-overlapping spectrotemporal modulation regions, suggesting that musical instrument timbres are characterized by specific spectrotemporal modulations.